The present disclosure relates to computer database products, and more specifically, to systems and methods for assessing the state of a database product installation on a computing device.
Database products are commonly used applications. However, from time-to-time, such database products change and need to be upgrade. For example, a database associated with the database product may change with respect to the data structures and/or values in those structures. Additionally, the applications that allow a user to interface and interact with the database may change to modify existing functionality or add new functionality. Whatever the change, however, software developers typically verify an installation of an upgrade version of a database product as part of a quality assurance process prior to installation at a customer site. Such processes help to ensure that the upgrade version of the database product is stable and consistent with respect to the previous version of the database product.
There are many existing tools to help developers perform comparisons between different database versions. The comparison process primarily identifies the differences between a new, “clean” installation of the database and any supported upgrade of a previous version of the database to the new version. Such processes help to reduce database inconsistencies that can be the root cause of numerous problems. For example, product upgrades can have missing tables, missing keys, inconsistent keys, and inconsistent default parameters. Another area where data inconsistency can be problematic is when the database version (e.g., a third-party database used by an application) is upgrade as part of the main product upgrade. By way of example only, such changes include changes in the datatype (e.g., unlimited Binary Large Objects (BLOBs) changed to fixed 256 character strings), changes to the storage engine parameters, and changes to the default character set.